I really don’t care what your political party affiliation is or your personal beliefs on matters, fear-mongering is being done every single day and I am sick of it. The main places you see it are the political level, of course, and at all levels of the political spectrum from presidential to town leadership. It’s everywhere though. It can even be seen when scheduling for classes, among other instances. Guess what, I’m done with it. It gets us nowhere and we need to stop with it all.

Let’s look at political commercials, mainly at the presidential level. Both candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have consistently released commercials slamming the other candidate. They aren’t talking about their own positives; they’re only talking about their opponent’s negatives. “If you elect her, this bad thing will happen!” “If you elect him, this bad thing will happen!” How does that get us anywhere? How are we supposed to make educated decisions based on the negatives of each other? Because of commercials alone and the fear-mongering that both candidates promote, we are put into the position of picking the lesser of two evils. That’s what fear-mongering does.

Another example? Well a key example of fear-mongering is the final presidential debate. When the topic of abortion brought up, Donald Trump only discussed the extremes of late-term abortion and painted a different picture about them than what really happens. He was making it seem like women could just casually choose to abort their baby within a week or even the day of the birth. First, if it was on the day of birth it would be infanticide…not abortion. Second, late-term abortions are typically only performed when there is extreme risk to the mother and/or the child if the birth does take place. It’s not an easy topic to talk about, with fear-mongering or without. I am no expert on this, however, and don’t claim to be. Get educated on the matter instead of just believing spouts of fear-mongering.

A final example? When the topic of nuclear weapons came up, Hillary gave us a clear picture of what could happen if Trump was elected. She mentioned that he is someone who gets ticked off easily and sends attacking Tweets at 3 A.M. with little thought. What happens if he gets access to nukes? If he would give the order, it would have to happen. That is what she continually repeated to us. If we elect Trump, we get to live in a nuclear warzone of an Earth. No word on what she would do, just what he would possibly do.

This is the world we live in currently. It’s not even just the presidential debate that’s starting this. I’ve watched commercials for state Senator and Representative elections. One uses war veterans to attack what their opponent plans to do. Another has the entire commercial take place in a CGI dark and stormy forest talking about the negatives of their opponent. Even during scheduling, when people ask advice on questionable professors we only talk about the scary aspects of the professor, not the good. We tell them, “Their major assignment? They never give 100’s and it takes hours and hours of work,” but we forget to mention, “Oh yeah, they are incredibly flexible and very helpful if you put effort in.”

I’ll admit to participating in fear-mongering, 99% of it being scheduling when other asks advice, it's easiest to point out the negatives…but I am done with fear-mongering. Both for myself and in general, it’s nothing but toxic.